Hon. Newsletter Editor:
Peter Edwards
E-mail: beekeepers@stratford-upon-avon.freeserve.co.uk

Those of you who booked a place for the annual dinner will know that it had to be postponed due to the inclement weather. It has now been rescheduled for 26 February and it is most important that you contact Terry Hitchman to confirm that you will still be attending. If you are unable to attend on 26 February, Terry will then be able to offer your place to other members, so anyone who did not book for January, but would now like a place, should also contact Terry as soon as possible on 01789 740136.

It has been three years since Sue and I went to the heather, having missed 2002 due to personal circumstances and the previous year because of Foot and Mouth, so it was good to return to the Yorkshire moors last year.

The drought here in late July enabled me to get the crop off colonies early and get empty supers on ready for the heather and there was even time for a quick thymol treatment to keep any varroa infestation levels down. Reports from Yorkshire indicated that the heather would be early so, as everything was ready, we decided to move on 3 August (the 'Glorious Twelfth' is the traditional date - but global warming may change this).

This time we tried some new ideas to make the move easier:

Colonies really need to be transported overnight in early August and, by the time that colonies have finished foraging, it is often difficult to get loaded before midnight - it can be later. This leaves us with a dilemma - do we go to bed, try to sleep for a few hours and then set off early, or do we load and go? We have tried both in the past and prefer the second option as it is difficult to sleep, knowing that you have to get up at around 4am, and any problems or delays will then mean that the journey will continue into the heat of the day.

The heather looked very good, with a substantial amount already in flower. We were able to set out the colonies very quickly as, with no roofs or stands to worry about, it was just a matter of lifting them off the trailer and opening the entrances. Taking the tent also worked very well; it was easy to sleep, knowing that the journey had been completed safely, and we felt very refreshed. For the future, we need to speed up the loading process so that we can depart earlier - this will give us longer to sleep on the moor.

The journey to bring the bees back home is always much easier, apart from the extra weight! We set off from Stratford on 30 August before lunch and, after a leisurely drive, arrived on the moor by mid-afternoon. The bees were flying well, despite a cool wind and the hives were very heavy. We would have left the bees on the moors for another week normally, but we had other commitments and the heather was nearly finished anyway. We drove to the farmhouses to deliver our 'rent' in jars of honey and to say hello once again to our hosts. Then back to the hives to wait for the bees to finish flying, usually around 4-5pm, and time to load up.

Then back to Stratford where we put the hives back on their sites before collapsing into bed at around 2am.
Peter Edwards

I have a sneaking admiration for varroa - it is certainly a great survivor. Despite hard chemicals, soft chemicals, fungi, drone-trapping, breaks in brood rearing, breeding resistant bees, open-mesh floors, dusts, heating colonies, the use of small cell combs, various manipulative techniques - the list is seemingly endless - varroa is still around and causing problems. Now comes news of another chemical to add to the growing arsenal - Sucrose Octanoate Esters (SOE). These look promising - but very time consuming in that each side of every comb has to be sprayed, rather like lactic acid, and I suspect that few beekeepers with more than a colony or two would be prepared to contemplate that much work. I wonder whether it might be possible to drip it like oxalic acid - apparently it cannot be applied using a fogger because it is damaged by heat. Reported results are between 60-100% efficiency, so there is clearly more work to do!

Bob Harrison in Missouri posted the following to the Bee-L list and I reproduce it here with his permission:

'The product will be sold by Dadant through their many U.S. branches starting in 2004. A test market will be done with commercial beekeepers in Florida this fall. I will also be running tests on the product myself this fall [2003. PE]. Jerry Hayes [of Dadant, PE] has already run tests on his own bees and is pleased with the results. The product although labour consuming does kill 100% of varroa if applied correctly and in the correct concentration. The product does not kill varroa in sealed cells but neither does our other registered controls. No brood kill has been reported so far.

The product is similar in use to an insecticidal soap in that it kills varroa either by suffocation or by breaking down the exoskeleton. The product quickly breaks down into fatty acids and sucrose, and zero contamination of wax or honey has been reported.

Jerry says the product will be inexpensive as you only mix a tablespoon and a half to a gallon of water in a gallon sprayer. The material will keep in the sprayer through the entire treatment period, which Jerry says is once a week for three weeks (to get all varroa emerging from cells).

By the time the finished label for the product concerning application (2004) is written, better ways of application might be figured out with input from commercial beekeepers in Florida.

The safety factor should be of great interest to all beekeepers. The product is safe to use by the beekeeper. The product does not contaminate the brood comb (which has been the case with other products) and does not kill queens & brood (a frequent problem with formic acid).

The EPA approved a section 3 label very quickly due to the safety aspect of Sucrose Octanoate Esters.

Although the product will surely appeal to the small hobby beekeeper for many reasons (legal & safe), Dadant hopes the product will appeal to the large commercial beekeeper for the same reasons. Dadant has always tried to provide the beekeeping industry with the tools the industry needs to survive. Let us try the product with an open mind and see if perhaps Sucrose Octanoate Esters will work for us.'
Peter Edwards

I was recently given a copy of Bee World from 1965. There were a number of interesting articles about beekeeping at that time and I will try to cover some of these in future newsletters. The following story about bees and aircraft caught my eye, co-incidentally just after someone had posted a message to the Bee-L list asking whether helicopters would have any effect on nearby hives.

It seems that the beekeeper ran a market garden and a fifty-hive apiary some five miles south-west of an airbase. He noticed that when the wind was from the west or south-west and planes from the base flew low over his apiary, the bees 'always came out to see what the noise was all about'. On such a day he set up some balloons on canes in an attempt to keep pigeons from his crops and when about thirty were in place a plane flew over. Within five minutes his bees had stung the balloons and burst them all. The main point of the story was that the balloons were red, yellow and blue - and the bees burst them in that order! The balloons were from five to a hundred yards from the hives and the colours were randomly distributed. The beekeeper was not attacked.
Peter Edwards